On the Beach
by L.M.Lewis
Summary: Of endings and beginnings . . . and the endings of beginnings.


Disclaimer: These are not my characters and I make no profit from them.

**Author's Note: **I borrow some timeline here from a story I wrote called "The Locked Room".

**On the Beach**

by L.M. Lewis

"… I didn't go to not come home." Eugene Cernan, Mission Commander, Apollo 17

**July 16, 1994**

When it came to Saturdays, Hardcastle had one firm rule. Except for flagrant necessities of the four-alarm variety, nobody went to the office on weekends. When there was work to be done—as there often was—it got done at the estate, and it was followed by a couple of burgers, nicely charred, and maybe a walk on the beach, to settle those.

On this particular Saturday, they'd finally gotten all the way through the transcript of _Cal. v. Yousef_, past the beer and burgers codicil, and had moved on to the leg-stretching part of the process. It was a clear evening with the sun just set. The judge halted in his stride, gaze drawn up toward the gibbous moon nearly overhead. Mark paused beside him.

"Makes ya think, huh?" the judge said. "Twenty-five years ago, today, they left to go there. Pretty amazing, even now."

Mark gazed up as well and then nodded. "Yeah, it was . . . not sure I appreciated it then. You followed all those moon missions, huh?"

"Sure I did, didn't everybody? Watched the launch on TV—it was the crack of dawn here. We all held our breath, hoping everything would go okay. Listened to Cronkite—the landing on Sunday morning. Tommy loved that stuff."

Mark felt a palpable twitch of surprise at this casual admission of Tom Hardcastle's name into the conversation. It wasn't as though they'd never talked about him, but it was still a rare thing, and not a name to be invoked lightly.

The judge must have misinterpreted the momentary silence. He was frowning in the deepening twilight.

"You're not gonna tell me you were in the lock-up that weekend, or you got beat-up or something like that, are you?" he asked cautiously.

McCormick chortled. Some of the quite-apparent tenseness went out of the judge's shoulders at the lightness of that laughter.

"_No_," the younger man assured him emphatically. "Jeez, you'd think it was some kinda Dickens' novel or something." He shook his head. "Nah, I remember it. No schoolyard fights even. It was _summer_, a hot one, too. I was working at a car-detailing place—youngest one on the crew so I got to do all the wheel-wells and sidewalls. We listened to it on the radio and every time I got a break I went in and caught a couple minutes of it on the TV in the waiting room. It was pretty cool."

"Well . . . _good_," Hardcastle said, sounding pleased to have found some safe neutral territory. Then he frowned briefly again. "But the moonwalk—you must've been home for that. It was in the middle of the night."

Mark's expression set, and then, almost as quickly, went sheepish. "Okay, maybe there was a _little_ Dickens to it." His smile was rueful. "I think I was between establishments right about then."

"Oh . . ."

"They could put a man on the moon," Mark grinned up at the moon in question, "but they couldn't put a fifteen-year-old kid into foster care--at least not so it'd stick. Let's just say I preferred being on my own."

He heard Hardcastle sigh. He avoided looking in that direction as he searched for a suitable conversational substitute.

"The last one, now, I remember _that_ . . . Apollo 17, I think," he added brightly. "I was down in Florida by then. That one was great."

He risked a quick sideward glance. The judge was staring out at the shimmering satin of the ocean, bedecked by crests of moonlit foam. The older man seemed lost in thought.

Mark plunged ahead; the memory so vivid in both image and emotion. "I was eighteen—I was breaking in engines for Flip and I'd just gotten my racing papers the week before. Flip said he'd give me a try at one of the smaller races that weekend, up in Valdosta. We loaded up, Wednesday evening, figuring we'd do the driving overnight, miss the heat.

"There we were, all set to go, when Flip said 'Hey, they're launchin' that rocket—the last one. Ever see one go up at night?'" Mark smiled. "Well, I hadn't, so instead of turning left and heading over to 75, we turned right, got down to the A1A and hung another right, by the beach. They let people drive on it, ya know. It was where they did all the old speed trials, way back."

The judge nodded, though slowly, as if he were distracted by some thoughts of his own.

Mark was still smiling. "We found an empty spot, way down toward the inlet. The road dead-ended there. There was a breakwater, lots of people there, sitting on it. Lots of beer. It was about midnight. The guys from the crew, and me, and Flip, we climbed up on the hauler. Somebody had a transistor and we listened to the countdown. 3. . .2 . . .1, and then we saw it, bright as anything. 60 miles away." He shook his head in persistent wonderment. "We all cheered our heads off. We watched it going up, through the clouds. Really," he smiled happily, "_really_—the most amazing thing." He wasn't sure, even now, what had been more astonishing—the rocket taking flight, or that he, himself, was sharing the moment with his friends.

"And then, as we were climbing down, the ground starts to shake—there was a sound like thunder. I froze. I thought something had gone wrong. I was _sure_ something terrible had happened." Mark shook his head ruefully. He'd always been waiting for the other shoe to drop, back then.

"Then Flip gave me a yank and pushed me toward the truck. 'Speed of sound,' he said. I was such an idiot. I'd forgotten about that. It took five minutes for the noise of the launch to reach us. Honest, the ground shook."

The story had wended to a close. The moon has slipped, in its own silent, lonely dignity, a little to the right. He cast up a quick glance and realized he had been going on for a while. Another quick glance--this one at Hardcastle, who was staring out to sea steadily.

He wondered if the judge had heard anything he'd just said, not that it mattered, but the man seemed distracted . . . _absent_. Without thinking, Mark ventured a standard query of his own—

"That was December, um, yeah, early December, '72. You remember it?"

There was a second of silence, like waiting for the sound to arrive from a far-off place, and then the judge murmured, "That one? No, not much."

"No one ever remembers the last," Mark speculated idly, but Hardcastle's quiet reticence seemed deeper than the mere misplacement of a memory. Mark frowned.

December. _1972_.

He felt his face draining. He hoped the pallor was indistinguishable in the moonlight.

"Sorry," he muttered.

There was another silent pause, but the judge had turned his head, which was now cocked slightly, as though the silence, or maybe the word, had at long last penetrated.

"It's not your fault," he said with a small and unexpected smile. "The world doesn't stop. Things go on. I remember where I was. LAX. He was in the naval hospital in Guam and I was going there to see him. Everybody'd tried to talk me out of it. Said they'd have him home soon enough—maybe Twenty-nine Palms even, someplace close. I could hear what they were really sayin': 'Forget it. He's already dead—mostly. There's nothing to visit." Hardcastle shrugged in persistent defiance of all such good and sensible advice.

"I don't give up so easy."

"You never did," Mark said looking up again at the imperfect orb. "We can put a man on the moon, but we can't undo the damage from one hand grenade, huh?"

"That's about it." Hardcastle inhaled deeply, having uttered more words on the subject than Mark had heard from him in the ten preceding years altogether. Then, with the letting out of that breath, he seemed to detach from the memory.

"You saw that one, huh? Must've been something," he said.

"The last one," Mark reminded him.

"The end of the beginning, maybe. Some things are always ending, some beginning. Did you win the race that weekend?"

"Hah," Mark shook his head, "blew an engine and the lead, a half mile short of the finish—but I got four lines in _Racing Today_. And I quote," he cleared his throat slightly, "'A newcomer to watch—'."

"—crash," Hardcastle interjected, swift and solemn, then spiked it with an utterly unexpected grin.

Mark smiled, and let him have his little joke, untopped and uncountered. It was a nice night and the moon, though far from perfect, was good enough.


End file.
